6/01/2009 @ 6:00AM

Apple's Chip Not Likely June 8

BURLINGAME, Calif. – There can be no doubt
Apple
is working on a low-power, mobile processor of its own. It acquired chip designer PA Semi early last year. And just last month, the Cupertino, Calif., company advertised for engineers familiar with the NEON extended instruction set used by next-generation ARM processors.

Wall Street analysts, however, say it’s unlikely that whatever wonder processor
Apple
is working on will be ready in time for a new iPhone, which they’re betting could debut as early as June 8 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Instead, mobile industry analysts say Apple will most likely turn to a faster version of the application processor it now buys from Samsung if it opts for a speedier processor for the iPhone.

Such a shift could speed up the thousands of third-party applications already distributed for the iPhone via Apple’s App Store, some of which tax the iPhone’s current processor. It would also better position the iPhone to compete against the Palm Pre, which will go on sale June 6 and boasts Texas Instrument’s OMAP3430 mobile processor.

That could buy time for Apple to finish work on something potentially much more radical. Such a processor would be based on the work of the team it inherited when it acquired PA Semi for $278 million. The fact that Apple was looking for a developer familiar with the NEON extended instruction set provides support for speculation Apple has already acquired a license from the U.K.’s ARM to develop processors based on its designs.

However, turning that design into a custom design typically takes hundreds of millions of dollars and two years worth of work, says Forward Concepts President Will Strauss. Other analysts figure it could take another five to nine months for any product developed by Apple’s team to be ready.

The payoff, however, could be big. The iPhone currently relies on an application processor with a single core. Shifting to a custom processor based on one of ARM’s newer, multi-core designs “could allow perhaps more multi-processing on an iPhone than on the average netbook or notebook PC,” says Richard Doherty, research director at the Envisioneering Group. That would allow the iPhone to tackle tasks such as voice recognition with one core, while sorting visual images with another, Doherty says.

Such a chip could find its way into many products, not just smart phones. “Maybe they [Apple] want to come out with a Mobile Internet Device or ‘smartbook,’ as Qualcomm is calling such things, or maybe their own version of a netbook,” Strauss says.

This technology is already being built in to Apple’s desktop computers. The company is pushing to better take advantage of multicore processors with the “Grand Central” technologies it is building into the latest version of its OS X operating system, dubbed Snow Leopard.

And while it is unlikely Apple will announce next week a product based on its own processors, the company may soon begin dropping subtle hints on its developers.